This book is broken into three parts. The first introduces the three projects that will be used throughout this book, the second introduces some of the most common themes in creating interaction in designs and applications, and the third introduces some of the more advanced topics that you may want to explore further. Also included with some of the chapters are interviews with programmers, artists, designers, and authors who work with the tools covered in this book. Covering such a massive range of topics means that this book doesn’t go into great depth about most of them, but it is filled with references to other books, websites, designers, and artists that you may find helpful or inspiring.
My excitement about the ideas and rapid growth of the field of interaction design is hard to contain. However, as exciting and far-reaching as interaction design is, the limitations of time and physical book size dictate that I be selective about what is and isn’t covered in this book.
This book covers Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks. To help novice programmers, it covers some of the core elements of programming in C and C++ for Arduino and openFrameworks and also covers the Processing language. We introduce dozens of libraries for openFrameworks and Processing—too many to list here. Some of these are official libraries or add-ons for the two frameworks, and some are simply extensions that have been created for this book or provided by altruistic coders.
We also introduce some of the basics of electronics and how computer hardware functions, as well as many tools and components that you can use with an Arduino. The Arduino and Processing IDEs are covered, as are two different IDEs for openFrameworks, namely, Code::Blocks, and Xcode. The Arduino Uno and Mini are covered in depth, and we discuss other boards only briefly. We cover many electronic components that have designed expressly for the Arduino, called shields, in depth as well.
While this book shows how to create some circuits, it doesn’t cover a great deal of the fundamentals of electronics or hardware, how to create circuits, or electronics theory. Chapter 17 lists some excellent tutorials and references. While the book does cover the Processing subset of the Java programming language, to conserve space and maintain focus, it doesn’t cover Java. The book doesn’t cover many aspects of C++, such as templates, inline functions, operator overloading, and abstract classes. Again, though, listed in Chapter 17 are several excellent resources that you can use to learn about these deeper topics in C++.
There are so many Arduino-compatible boards now that it’s almost impossible to cover them all in depth; the book mentions the Mega, the Nano, Fio, and several other boards only in passing and leaves out many of the Arduino-compatible boards that are not created by the Arduino team. Quite a few components and other tools that we would have liked to discuss in depth could not be included to maintain scope and to save space.
Many topics that we would have liked to include have been left out because of space considerations: artificial intelligence, data visualization, and algorithmic music, among others. Though these are all potentially interesting areas for artists and designers, the focus of the book is on teaching some of the theory and techniques for interaction design as well as the basics of hardware and programming. The resources listed at the end of the book can provide the names of some materials that might help you explore these topics.
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
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Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant widthUsed for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.
Constant width boldShows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italicShows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.
Tip
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Caution
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I need, first and foremost, to thank the wonderful engineers, artists, programmers, and dreamers who created the platforms that I’ve covered in this book. It is to all of them that I would like to dedicate this book. A woefully short list has to include Massimo Banzi, Tom Igoe, David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, David A. Mellis, Ben Fry, Casey Reas, Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson, Arturo Castro, and Chris O’Shea, the creators of the frameworks covered in this book. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other names that should be on this list, but space is too limited to list them all. All I can say is thank to you to all the creators of these frameworks and to everyone who uses them to inspire, invent, amaze, and enrich the dialogue about design, technology, and art. This book is a humble attempt to thank you all for everything you’ve given to me—and to every other programmer, artist, or designer interested—for working with computing in novel and interesting ways and bringing more people into the conversation. I would also like to extend my deepest thanks to all my interviewees for taking the time to respond to my questions and enrich this book and for so enriching the world of interaction design and art. To everyone who provided code for this book as well, created open source code, or answered questions on any of the forums for beginners: thank you for your efforts to create a community.
This book is as much my effort as it is the sum of the efforts of the editorial team that worked on it. My technical editors, Michael Margolis, Adam Parrish, Matt Obert, Jeff Crouse, and Jeremy Rotzstain, have been absolutely fantastic. Their expertise, suggestions, and fresh look at what I was working on shaped not only this book but enlightened me, showed me new ways of solving problems, introduced me to new tools and techniques, sharpened my thinking, and broadened my horizons for the better. This book is a collaboration among all four of us in every sense of the word. I cannot pay them enough thanks for their excellent work. I would also like to thank Justin Hunyh and Mike Gionfriddo from LiquidWare as well as Nathan Seidle from Sparkfun for all of their help. My editors—Shawn Wallace, Robyn Thomas, and Kim Wimpsett—have been incredible, helping me with my sometime torturous grammar and patiently working with my propensity for sending in extremely rough drafts to bounce ideas off of them. They have made this book better than it ever could have been without their watchful eyes and guidance. Finally, I need to thank Steve Weiss for listening to my idea when I first proposed it and helping guide it through to completion.
I need to thank all of my friends in New York, Portland, Amsterdam, Geneva, London, Zurich, Boston, Paris, Copenhagen, and Toulouse for their support, their ideas, their Internet, and their encouragement. I would like to thank my family as well, and particularly my mother, for their support and humor.
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